The primary goal of the foundation is to promote and support the development of the Bulgarian university education through a number of initiatives including the organisation and sponsorship of conferences.

Anna’s experience at the LSE Summer School 2017

LSE Reflections – by Anna Kyosova

LSE or The London School of Economics and Political Science is one of the world’s top universities in the field of economics and political science. The Open Innovations course that I attended is years ahead of all of the other universities.

This course had the most amazing blend of theory and implementation knowledge that can hardly be found in Universities nowadays. Open innovation is a field of study that you cannot just Google. It has just started developing as an academic field of studies over the last decade and because of the still developing nature of the field and due to the fact that the real-life implementation is heavily reliant on the nature of the respective companies, some of the definitions and lines between the different OI tools can become blurred. The first thing that this course will give you is the original definitions of the tools, their original purpose and implementations and how they have changed overtime.

The second valuable thing that is to be gained from this course are the top secret LSE owned studies of the OI implementation in some of the world’s top companies. In addition to providing inside knowledge, we were also able to see the results from the case studies, what was successfully implemented and what was not and analyze the most possible reasons and what to be avoided while implementing this or that technique.

Due to the Professor’s vast experience in consulting, we were also able to see some of the potential signs of future problems within the companies examined and how to avoid them and gain competitive advantage in the process. The course also examines different variations of Business model innovation as well as the various kinds of ambidexterity, i.e the balance between trying to create a new or novel service and product and improving the already existing products and services.

If it was not for this course, I would not have been able to gain all that knowledge. Normally, people have told me to get a degree and then learn how everything is supposed to work on the job, however, if I had to lean all this knowledge on the job I would have had to be one of the top managers at companies such as Google, Wikipeadia, Proctor and Gamble, 3M etc.